As a student at Central, I have had the opportunity to embark on the fairly new and small Museum Studies Program. In the introduction course of this minor, we are required to study and learn how to make our own museum mission statement. The mission statement of a museum states the educational and communal goal of the institution. The mission statement of a museum can be quite long and lengthy or just a few sentences. The Seattle Art Museum has a fairly short mission statement, and gets to the point about what kind of art they show. The SAM mission statement reads, “From its early 20th-century roots as the Seattle Fine Arts Society to its growth into an internationally renowned museum with three distinct venues, explore how the Seattle Art Museum evolved into a vital Seattle institution.” For me, this means that the SAM collects and shows items as an institution to contribute to the evolution of Seattle, and that the items they collect will help to teach the community about art history and the different aspects of art.
Among the permanent collection in the SAM, are two pieces believed to be from the Mannerism period of the late Renaissance; Abraham Janssens’, The Origin of the Cornucopia, and Vincent Sellaer’s, Leda and the Swan and Her Children. When looking at a painting and attempting to determine the time from which it came, there are many things to look at and think about. For some periods, it is quite easy to pin point the time of origin. For art work done in the Mannerism time, it may be hard for some people to find the differences when comparing it to a piece from the late Renaissance. Seen as these art periods are about the same time in history, they have many of the same aesthetic characteristics. Both use bright, yet natural colors and the artists worked to portray the clarity of contours and used sharp details and showed pictorial boundaries and depth. . Both realms of artists use mostly humans as their subjects, even though both are not depicting actual humans (Renaissance artists painted angels and saints, and Mannerism artists depicted gods and the people they chose to contact on earth.) The artists of these times both paint in a fairly realistic way, showing the humans with real human features, with real human colors and real human expressions or actions.
Even though these two art periods are closely related, they do now, however, portray the same message as one another. The Renaissance was about The Church, and the rebirth of the people. It was important to use proportions and balance to convey human-heavens balance; they showed the normal and supernormal (angels and saints) to show the religious concepts of earth-universe dominance (Universe and church ruled all).The Mannerism art period, however, was the reaction to the rebirth. The artists and other people in the community began to reform and started to speak out against the church. The ideals of Greek Mythology came back to play in some people’s outlook on life and religion, while others took the Catholic faith and revamped it to make their own. Most Mannerism artists took the opportunity to paint depictions of stories not related to the bible. Some took Greek and Roman mythology stories to show their true feelings about the church and they way church officials were acting. Others were hired or just chose the opportunity to do paintings of Greek Mythology.
The two pieces in the Seattle Art Museum’s collection mentioned above, do belong in the Mannerism period. I feel that they do, because they both depict stories that are closer related to, if not actually are, Greek Mythology. Vincent Sellaer’s piece, Leda and the Swan and Her Children, is a depiction of when Zeus came to Leda in the form of a swan, causing Leda to bear Zeus’ children into eggs. This story is in no way related to the bible, the church, nor would they acknowledge this an accurate depiction of Leda and her children. The other piece, Abraham Janssens’, The Origin of the Cornucopia, would also fall into the realm of being a Mannerism painting due to that it also does not depict a story from the bible, but a legend about how the tradition of this presentation of Autumn harvest. Abraham shows four river nymphs moving slowly and majestically to place the harvest into the cornucopia.
